Crossfit Goal Setting: By Coach Kermit

"A goal without a plan is just a wish."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The workouts designed by your creative (and slightly sadistic) coaches combine all sorts of different exercises and movement patterns with varying repetitions and weight. These workouts are very effective for improving the 10 general physical skills, but how do we track progress? By recording everything! We need to know where we are now so that we can plan for where we are going. So, it's time to take stock and in a few weeks we will be setting some new goals. Here are some goal setting tips.
1. Consider the following example.
"I want to improve my rowing." How do you measure this? Are you talking about your technique or your times? How do you know you've achieved your goal?
BE SPECIFIC ~ put in times, dates and amounts so that you will know exactly when you have reached your goal or when you need to re-evaluate your goal.
"I want to reduce my 500m row time to 1:49 by the end of October."
2. Suppose you have many goals. You want to increase your max number of pushups to 45, reduce your Science Ball Run to 5:00, hold an L-sit for 1:00 and increase your back squat to 200 lbs, all of this in 3 months. Where to begin?
SET PRIORITIES ~ You know which goals are most important to you and which will be the easiest to achieve. A little bit of strategy can go a long way to realizing the majority of your goals.
Also, don"t be afraid to break things down. If your overall goal is to make the board by increasing your CrossFit total score by 50 points then maybe your first goal should be to increase your shoulder press by 15 lbs. After all the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.
3. BE REALISTIC ~ If you weight 120 lbs then a 400 lb deadlift is not impossible…but it is highly improbable. Unrealistic goals prove to exercises in frustration.
4. WRITE IT DOWN ~ Putting pen to paper helps to crystallize your goals and give them more oomph.
So, put on your thinking caps because in a few weeks the coaches will be working to help everyone set short and long term goals. And remember Krav Troy's quotation,
"It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it."
Arnold Toynbee
Editor's Note: Ask Kermit any one of her maxes or scores in any of the "hurricanes" and she will know the number. She lknows where she is at and where she is going. We could all learn something from her in this areana.